WARNING: Facebook Social Plugins Issue [Advanced Solutions]

Analytics · By On · 4 Comments

Impor­tant Note: This issue only affects peo­ple using the Face­book fea­ture known as the Face­book Social Plu­g­ins. The issue is not caused by Omni­ture or Adobe code it is an inher­ent issue caused by the design of the Face­book Social Plu­g­ins.  These are not Omni­ture or Adobe plu­g­ins, so if you are not using these Face­book tools then you do not need to worry.

If your com­pany is using Face­book social plug-ins you might have issues with your ana­lyt­ics data.  Depend­ing on the plug-in, if you don’t take action to fix the issue then you will start to receive an arti­fi­cial infla­tion of face­book refer­ring traf­fic and an increase in pageviews.

Issue:

Some face­book social plug-ins redi­rect when a user inter­acts with the plug-in.  The redi­rect goes to face­book and quickly lands the user back onto your site.  The redi­rect does not pass the refer­rer through so your traf­fic sources report will show that the visit orig­i­nated from face­book and over­write the cor­rect cam­paign or traf­fic source that brought the user to your site.  So your traf­fic sources report­ing will be significantly erroneous.

Plug-ins that may be affected:

  • Activ­ity Feed
  • Rec­om­men­da­tions
  • Like But­ton

Fix:

We have a VISTA solu­tion that will fix the issue for you.  If you are not famil­iar with VISTA solu­tions then all you need to know is the Adobe Engi­neer­ing Ser­vices team will do all the work for you.  You do not need to change any imple­men­ta­tion on your side.  We also have a JavaScript plug-in that will solve the prob­lem as well.

How to get the VISTA solution:

You can go to the Adobe Engi­neer­ing Ser­vices Solu­tion Por­tal and request more infor­ma­tion.  Once you do that we will get the request and respond back to you with the next steps within a few days.  You can also con­tact your Account Man­ager or any one of your con­tacts at Adobe and they should be able to point you in the right direction.

Other posts you might be inter­ested in:

As always, post your com­ments or e-mail me at pearcea (at) adobe​.com.  It is your com­ments and e-mails that keep me post­ing and give me ideas for future posts.

  • tom pitts

    we were expe­ri­enc­ing a sim­i­lar (same?) issue with the FB like and ended up hav­ing to fix using javascript. details here: http://​forum​.devel​op​ers​.face​book​.net/​v​i​e​w​t​o​p​i​c​.​p​h​p​?​p​i​d​=​2​8​6​4​6​6​#​p​2​8​6​466

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/paurigemma Pearce Aurigemma

      Glad you got it fixed!
      I love hear­ing suc­cess stories.

  • Keith MacD

    We stum­bled across this same prob­lem try­ing to track FB share but­ton clicks. onClick Cus­tom Link track­ing wasn’t work­ing out of the box so Client­Care pro­vided JS code to fix the problem:

    “What is hap­pen­ing here is that your Face­book JS call is hijack­ing the onclick event and replac­ing the link’s onclick with your own onclick func­tion, which essen­tially over­writes the Omni­ture onclick code and causes it to never exe­cute. There are a few ways to han­dle this col­li­sion, but you could also han­dle it on the base page by just append­ing our code to the Face­book onclick func­tion after that function’s call.”

    This seemed to fix the basic link-tracking prob­lem, but failed as soon as we tried to pass an s.prop in the same call. Still wait­ing to hear back from Client­Care with a solu­tion to the prop problem.

  • Andy

    Keith MacD:

    In your reply you stated: “There are a few ways to han­dle this col­li­sion, but you could also han­dle it on the base page by just append­ing our code to the Face­book onclick func­tion after that function’s call.”

    Could you shed some light on the few ways to han­dle this sit­u­a­tion? Also, could you explain how to append your code the Face­book onclick fun­tion call?